


The Unlonely Goatherd

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff, The Angry Goose Of Destiny, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 10:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16116413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: He's not fixed. He'll never be fixed. He just wants to get by enough.





	The Unlonely Goatherd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thinlizzy2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinlizzy2/gifts).



> So this is a distraction for those of you who need it today. *hugs*
> 
>  **thinlizzy2** , this was also my original idea for your AU Exchange gift.

His name is James Buchanan Barnes and the world is new again.

The air is hot on his skin, dry and dusty with the promise of rain, and his thoughts are sharp, without the hazy blur of the last few years. He feels like he’s woken fully rested from a deep sleep, after years of drifting in and out of consciousness, never quite able to rest.

 _Feel free to use the river,_ said Princess Shuri of Wakanda, whose knowledge and technology and ingenuity in working out how to un-brainwash him didn’t keep her from plain speaking. _You reek after all that sweating._

Bucky was taught that it wasn’t polite for a young woman to talk about reeking, let alone sweating. But he was also taught that it’s not polite to offend the noses of everyone around you, particularly when they all seem very clean and hygiene-conscious, even out here among the village and the farms.

Although Bucky’s not sold on the persisting smell of goat.

But he goes down to the river, to a curve in the river where the water cuts deep into the bank and the reeds grow taller than a man. Behind the natural screen, he peels off his clothing, piece by piece, still accustoming himself to doing things without one arm. The Wakandans dressed him in pull-on clothing, but it’s still an effort to do things – not to mention remembering that he only has one hand anymore.

His clothing _does_ stink. He dumps it in the edge of the river, planning to find a way to rinse it off after he’s rinsed himself off.

Then he steps in among the sharp and spotted reeds, into the river. The water is sleek and cooling against his skin, mud and smooth river stones seeping between his toes as he wades out into the deeper water, crouching down to let the current swirl around his sticky skin, washing him clean.

He takes a deep breath and dunks his head under and drifts a little with the current before surfacing with a gasp, tossing his hair back from his face.

There’s a honk in his ear, so loud he flinches away. A large black eye affixes him, and then there’s an orange beak snapping at his face and a sudden buffeting of air laden with the musky scent of feathers.

Bucky yelps as he kicks out, instinctively trying to get away from whatever water-monster is coming for—

Oh.

It’s a goose.

A huge, all-over grey goose that’s giving him the beady eye as it floats casually on the river, like Bucky’s trespassing in its territory and it’s about to run him off.

Slowly, Bucky swims backwards, away from the goose. Sure, he’s bigger than it, but the damn things are probably territorial, and the last thing he needs after the Wakandans have been so nice to him, is to annoy one of their farm animals—

Except that the goose is exceptionally large, and looks...menacing.

There are also no other geese around it – not on the water, not on the riverbanks, not within earshot—

Bucky keeps backing up through the water – still too deep for comfort, and the goose follows him. It paces him at a steady paddle, all the way back to the shallows and up to the reeds, and even when he backs out of the water, one hand covering his balls, because he doesn’t want the bird to decide that he might be edible.

The goose keeps coming. It backs him up out of the water, beating at the air with its wings when Bucky tries to make a detour for his clothing. He makes the detour anyway – it’s a goddamn _goose_ after all, and he’s a fully trained soldier of war and feared assassin—

_HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK!_

That’s a nope, then.

He barely manages to snatch his sopping pants, but the goose gives him no time to put them on. It rushes him, wings flapping, beak outstretched, and Bucky is forced to scramble before the damn thing pecks his pecker off! There’s no time to think about what he’s doing. No space to think that what’s chasing him is, of all things, a goose. No opportunity for anything more than mad panic. Bucky Barnes, hunted once again—

He scrambles up the slope towards the road and the stand of trees that marked the bathing spot, and hopes that there’s nobody there who’s going to take offence at a nearly naked, slightly crazy white guy sprinting away from a humungous grey goose—

“Hey, what is wrong? What has happened?”

And it would have to be the fucking Princess Shuri of Wakanda who comes to find him, unconcerned that he’s just run naked from the river, with a sodden pair of trousers for a loincloth.

“I—the river—that goose—” He grabs her arm, herding her out of the way of the crazy creature coming right for them, never mind that it means she’ll be staring at his utterly unprotected pink buttocks—

Startled, she catches his shoulder as he swings her around behind him. “What is it?” But when she peeps around his shoulder, her cheek warm against his cooled skin, she takes one look at the goose and laughs. “Oh, that’s nothing to worry about. Have you never seen one of our geese before?”

Bucky stares at the goose that’s standing two yards away, brown head tilted at him as though trying to decide what he is. It’s not grey and giant– not even close. It’s white and brown, with big dark circles around its eyes, almost like a skull. Its feathers are dappled along the wings, with a breast and underside the color of rich mud. Beyond it are several other geese of the same type, fluffing their feathers like they just happened to be around when—

When what? When a giant grey goose appeared out of nowhere, and chased him out of the river, only to vanish when he found himself naked in front of the Princess of Wakanda?

“That’s.. That’s not...” Bucky shakes his head, suddenly uncertain of his memory all over again. “I thought—I thought I saw...something else.”

Her eyes widen, and her hand drops down to his bicep, gripping hard in sudden alarm. “Do you have a headache? Is there anything you are seeing in the corner of your eye? The process should not have taken anything of your memories - I was so careful around the hippocampus! But even in my lab it is possible to make an error—”

Her distress is palpable, and Bucky doesn’t want her to beat herself up. She’s got so much enthusiasm and joy and belief— “No.” He covers her hand with his. “It’s not your process, Princess.” He was fine until he went in the river and then—

Weirdness. Crazy geese and a panicked remnant of his personal psychoses. Even the brilliant young Princess of Wakanda can’t fix those.

“I’m fine,” he tells her.

She tilts her head at him, almost birdlike. “You are sure?”

There’s a flurry of wings beating at the air and a loud honking, and Bucky glances at the grey goose – the grey goose that turns to brown and white a second after he looks at it directly.

_Son of a—_

Shuri is still waiting for his answer, and he makes himself look her in the eye in reassurance. It’s not her processes, or her fault, and he won’t let her think it is.

“I’m sure.”

* * *

There’s no shortage of animals around the village. Geese, most of them the normal brown-eyed and undersided type, ducks, and chickens, a couple of head of cattle which Luambe the horticulturalist is trying to breed to process the local grasses more efficiently, and wild pigs which he hears about because the young men have talked about it being time for a boar hunt. There’s even a hippopotamus or two further along the river, although everyone assures him that nobody’s farming _those_.

He’s a little concerned about the emphasis.

And there are the goats.

Of course, there would be goats.

Milking the goats is a collective social activity in this village and everyone takes a turn until they’re proficient.

Bucky’s protest that he has only one hand is given short shift. He is told that one hand is sufficient to milk a goat so long as he is not trying for the record of the world’s fastest milker. So he learns how to milk goats – preferably without getting the bucket casually kicked over because goats are like people: they all have a little asshole in them, and some of them have rather more.

The second time that Princess Shuri turns up in the village, he’s milking a nanny who’s usually one of the more patient ones. This morning, though she’s sidling around, nervous and edgy and making it hard for Bucky to get a steady rhythm on the teat.

Around him, conversations rise and fall, chatter and laughter that he’s grown accustomed to in the weeks he’s been here. They won’t bother him if he doesn’t speak to them, don’t require him to interact if he doesn’t want to. He’s been mostly accepted by the locals, and those that don’t like him there frown at him from a distance.

So he doesn’t look around when the chatter lifts like a wave, buoyed by the piping voices of the children who are the first and the loudest.

Taijie the nanny goat sidles again, and he makes a grumpy noise in his throat and briefly wishes he had his arm as he uses his shoulder and forehead to get her back into positi—

The bugling _HONK HONK HONK_ in his ear is a shock. He jerks sideways at the snap of an orange beak way too close to his eye, and waves a hand that he realises he no longer has a second after he does it. Then, because he’s a one-handed idiot who forgot he was one-handed, he tries to scramble away from the grey beast that’s suddenly decided now’s a good time to attack him. Unfortunately, his feet get tangled between the stool and Taijie’s legs and his balance is shot without the arm. He goes sprawling in the straw, and Taijie, displeased with how he’s botched her milking, kicks the bucket over him as she leaps away, scattering village kids before her – and one grey goose that turns to white-and-brown as the goat gallops past it.

Bucky closes his eyes as fresh milk soaks his trouser legs, and sighs as laughter erupts around him.

When he opens his eyes, Princess Shuri is peering down at him, smiling and concerned. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, but I think I bruised my dignity,” he admits.

“Dignity heals.” Her lips press together in a confiding smile. “Or so I tell my brother very often!”

She holds out a hand to help him up. Bucky was planning to roll to his knees and climb to his feet, because the kid doesn’t look like she’s a hundred pounds soaking wet. But he takes her hand because she’s offered it and it would be rude otherwise. And she hauls him up with more strength than he expects – enough to put them chest to chest and nose to chin.

Bucky catches a whiff of something spicy, a little earthy, a little like the air just before rain. It catches in his throat, in his senses - her hair oil, or maybe a perfume? He shifts weight as she turns her head in answer to Wakandan laughter, about to lean in and take a deeper breath of it. He stops himself, just shy of leaning into her personal space and inhaling.

What is he _doing_?

He steps back. Then he’s glad he did because he’s a mess.

Goat’s milk drips in rivulets down to the floor, and his trouser legs are half-dirt, half-mud. He wore his oldest clothes to the morning’s milking, because it never ends cleanly, even when he’s not interrupted by a—

Goose. Most decidedly not grey, although larger than any of the village geese. It’s standing a yard away, it’s head tilted as though considering whether or not to chase the two of them. God only knows where.

Bucky starts towards the goose, with some wild thought of grabbing it by the throat and shaking it until it...what? Reveals its true colors? Expires from strangulation?

“So you haven’t yet reconciled with the geese.” Shuri’s laughter makes his head turn, like a compass pointing north.

“Or the goats,” says one of the locals with a snort. “Go on then, highness. Take him away for your tests, and let us clean up and finish the others.”

He waits until they’re out of the milking shed before asking, “Tests?”

She indicates his missing arm. “I need to calibrate the connections in your shoulder; perhaps even develop an entirely new interface to work with our technology. The neural connections seemed sketchy – some of our surgeons might be able to work with the scar tissue so you get proper sensory input from the arm—”

“What if I don’t want a new arm?”

His question startles her. “Why wouldn’t you want a new arm?”

“Because...” He struggles to put his uncertainty into words. He can’t. “I just don’t want it.”

She frowns. “But people who lose limbs have prosthetics developed for them and learn how to use them.”

“Not always.” He thinks of the veterans of the Great War, sitting out on the tenement steps of home, missing legs and arms and other things, skin and flesh, hollowed out with pain and the memories of a war they thought they’d never have to fight again.

The war to end all wars. Ha!

“ _Here in Wakanda_ ,” she says fiercely, “ _everyone_ who loses a limb has a prosthetic developed for them. It is not always a hand or a foot, but something that works for them. Sometimes even a multi-tool! And it does not need to be used if they do not wish to use it – although if there is pain in the using, then we try to alleviate that, too.”

She’s getting stressed, her voice rising, her body tense. Bucky doesn’t know why it bothers her that he won’t take a prosthetic – sure, he’s kind of her experiment, but...does it really matter?

There’s a peck at his leg, and he starts. A black-eyed Wakandan goose glares up at him. At least…it looks like a Wakandan goose. And it keeps on looking like a Wakandan goose, but honks in a way that manages to sound distinctly threatening.

Or maybe he’s imagining things again.

One thing he’s not imagining is Shuri’s bewilderment, though. And he reminds himself that she’s young – still a kid - and she probably doesn’t yet understand that sometimes it’s not as easy as being ‘fixed’. He’ll never be fixed. He just wants to get by enough.

“Look, I’ll do the tests, but...I don’t want the arm. I can’t... Not yet.”

‘Not yet’ appears to be good enough for her, although her brow furrows. Bucky wants to reach out and smooth his fingers across her skin. She’s too young to be getting worry lines – a kid with way too much in her head, and far too much concern for an old, brokedown soldier.

At their feet, the goose honks and pecks him again.

He tries to kick it, but it dodges his foot.


End file.
